Holding Out for a Hero
Red Sox, Comics and True Tales of Terror
-By Victor D.Infante
It’s the last, dwindling days of October, with Halloween and an election looming like the Hunter’s Moon that shined down—I kid you not—blood red over Busch Stadium as the Boston Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals in game four of the World Series.
How can anyone not feel magic in the air when factors like this converge in less than a week? Perhaps, if you live in Southern California, you’re having trouble relating— L.A.’s not much of a baseball town, after all. Even the Angels play in Anaheim, at a stadium named for a power company where you can buy expensive beer and sushi, and watch impressive fireworks displays between innings.
No, baseball in Southern California’s as vital and pulsing as Disneyland, just down the street. A good time, certainly, if a bit overpriced, and it’s hard to say what it says about you-- or, really, about anyone. And of course, it’s all so much more family friendly since they pushed the strip clubs out, isn’t it?
Ah, but if you do have baseball in your soul, then perhaps no image from this year’s World Series is as evocative as pitcher Curt Schilling, standing his ground on the mount with a bleeding ankle. Now that’s pathos. That’s a little bit of sports legend for posterity. Schilling, teeth grit in obvious pain, later hands clenched tight in prayer on the sidelines—how can even the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino hold up against imagery like that?
Again, L.A.’s not a baseball town, but it does know a good story when it sees one, and this year’s Red Sox win is the stuff of mythology—American as apple pie and laden with superstition and superheroes, transcendent of the election-year, war-ravaged world outside. Well, until Schilling endorsed President Bush on TV and wrecked the whole damn moment. Remember, kids! When Massachusetts liberals are throwing the party? Don’t spit in the drinks.
But the Sox being the local heroes they are, everything was forgiven once Schilling begged off campaigning for the President, so that’s all right. Let all our post-game riots be joyous affairs. Pass the bottle and burn something down.
Of course, it’s utterly absurd to deny Schilling his politics—different as they may be from most in Boston’s. Baseball players are shipped around the country like prefab furniture. He’s from the Bible belt somewhere—where his conservative politics are more the norm. But that’s the funny thing about being a superhero—people want you to be something more than human, something more than this ugly mire the rest of us are soaking in. We don’t want them to be like us—we know what we’re like, and for most of us, there’s not enough Miller time in the world to drown it out. We want them to be better.
Which is ironic on two counts—on the first, the whole point of having heroes was to have something to aspire to, meaning that if you worked hard enough, and ate all your vegetables, you could be just like Donald Rumsfeld or something like that, but ultimately, they were real people. Which leads to the second irony, which is that the main purveyors of superheroes—comic books—have worked damn hard over the decades to achieve some sort of humanity in their spandex-wearing leads, and some small bit of literary merit. Well, except perhaps anything written by Chuck Austen, which is a joke we’ll leave to the funny-book faithful.
The ironic thing about picking up most comic books these days is that they’re hardly comic-bookish at all. Indeed, the only thing that ever gets described as comic-bookish at all these days are movies, particularly movies based on comic books—and mostly only those that suck. Like The Hulk.
Comic books are a strange industry. Like rock ’n’ roll, it’s one of those things that we invented and then the British came along and did better. At about the time they were being battered for indecency by the McCarthy Hearings, their overt politics were about as red, white and blue as Capt. America’s shield, but then, career soldiers were called in front of the hearings and denounced as traitors, too. A lot of this is captured really well in Michael Chabon’s excellent novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and there’s no point in going into it at length, save to say that like a lot of well-behaved political moderates, they got smacked upside the head when it was convenient. For the next decade or so, comic books were a bland affair, where the good guys were good guys and the bad guys were bad guys, and Superman made sure to put the flag back up on top of the White House before he flew home to not have sex with Lois Lane.
And yet, this deep, dark creative black hole is where we get the stereotype most people associate with comics, the flat, empty storytelling that gave birth to the “Batman” TV show. “Bif! Bam! Pow! Holy Hoover Factory, Batman! No one will ever take us seriously again.”
Relevance eventually returned to comic books, though. Julius Schwartz spearheaded the revival of lost gems like the Flash and Green Lantern. Visionaries like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave us new, relatable characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men which still grab the American psyche.
And one day, in the early 1970s, a writer named Dennis O'Neal, took a serious gamble, and launched two of his characters—Green Arrow and Green Lantern—on a jaunt around America, two “Hard Traveling Heroes,” taking a good, hard look at all the stuff superheroes couldn’t fix—drug abuse, racial intolerance. Stuff like that.
It was good, risky writing, and it was rewarded and memorialized and people still bow down to it in homage, as well they should. But that was only half the sucker punch—no, the real punch came when the heroes came home, and Green Arrow discovered that while his kid sidekick—appropriately named “Speedy”—was hooked on heroin.
There’s a lesson here—one a lot of people should pay attention to. High-minded ideals are wonderful, but pay attention to what’s going on around you, too. Ideals alone don’t cut it, and heroes fall down hard. Because, you know, they’re only human—even if they can pitch a winning game in the World Series on a bloody ankle.
An article in a small-town New England newspaper points out that superheroes are the hot costumes this Halloween. That shouldn’t be surprising—The “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” movies have kicked off a new love affair with super-heroes, even if the industry itself is still struggling a bit. Because, you know, everyone loves comics, just not, you know, to read.
Celebrity authors are all the rage these days—“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” Joss Whedon’s writing “Astonishing X-Men,” “Clerks” writer/director Kevin Smith has taken a hand at “Green Arrow” and “Daredevil, and best-selling mystery novelist Brad Meltzer has been penning a wicked little tale called “Identity Crisis,” which has knocked off a couple important supporting characters. It’s good stuff--mythical, in its way, as American as rock ’n’ roll and baseball.
Of course, most of the movies being based on comics really do suck, and make me worry for any long-term resurgence. For every excellent one, like Hellboy or X-Men, you have something that’s just soulless and atrocious, like the Hulk or Daredevil. I know Hollywood’s not a baseball town, but I’m not sure how much of a comic book town it is, either. I hope that, if Hollywood’s going to immerse itself in the world of superheroes for awhile longer, it pays close attention to the work of these writers immersing themselves in that world right now—because as people may think they want to lose themselves in perfect heroes who pitch perfect games every time and never have unpopular opinions,. What they need are heroes who will look to save the world, starting not with the invading space aliens and the distant, abstract causes, but with the kid right next to them, the one who’s eyes are hardening into slits as the track marks work their way up their arms.
Turn that into a comic book movie. I dare you.
Victor D. Infante writes "'Infante's Inferno' for Write Movies.com and 'How to 'Succeed As A Failing Writer' for Gotpoetry.com. He is a poet and journalist living in Worcester, MA, and is currently finishing his first novel, "Nihilist Chic. Visit him online at http://www.victorinfante.com and at http://www.livejournal.com/users/ocvictor/.
